About Brandon
1. Range
I’m a teacher. By this point I’ve taught a bunch of ages —
High school? ✔
College classes? ✔
Elementary school? ✔
Middle? ✔
Preschool? Yes, actually, a little!
I’ve particularly worked with kids with ADHD, and gifted kids. I’ve also taught a goodly number of subjects —
Math? ✔
History? ✔
Science? Ho yeah
Literature? ✔
Philosophy? ✔
World religions? ✔
Calvin and Hobbes? ✔
Happiness? ✔
Evil? ✔
I’ve nursed a bad case of teacher wanderlust, chasing whatever opportunities bring the chance to try something new.
2. Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Sure, sure — but did you ever run a summer camp for high schoolers on the varieties of feminism where you also taught students to make crêpes?
I did!
Q: In the course of your work, have you ever been bitten by a billionaire’s dog?
Just the once, while running a business as a very high-end test-prep tutor.
3. Blah blah blah
I graduated summa cum laude from the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University with bachelor’s degrees in history and religious studies (a vivid, intellect-stretching program, ★★★★), and I have a master’s in educational leadership from the University of Washington (a dogmatic, imagination-shrinking program, ★☆☆☆).
I’m the founder of Science is WEIRD, where we’re building a six-year course that hitches rationality to the imagination to lead families around the world fall in love with all the sciences.
4. New Kinds of Schools
For more than a decade, I’ve been obsessed with understanding what sorts of education change lives. I’ve committed my life to exploring and helping create new models of schooling.
I started by serial dating the options on offer.
I fell in love with constructivism and progressive education, and taught at a hippie school. Then I fell in love with classical education, and re-tooled my classes around it.
Then I found Montessori.
Then I discovered Waldorf.
Then… well, I worked my way through a lot of other educational philosophies.
All along, I tested out how these worked in practice. And, truly, almost all of them had real insights into what kids (and other human beings) are — what we want, what sorts of information fit easily into our heads, and so on.
(And I was fitting these ideas into the still-bigger picture: while all this was happening, I was plunging into libraries, getting up-to-date on cognitive psychology, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and so on.)
This whole blog is about his ideas, so I won’t say much more here about his ideas, save this: they’re the real deal.
I’ve been shamelessly using them to build the entire Science is WEIRD curriculum. But they’re more powerful than that — they have the ability to help us re-think everything we do in education, and begin to bring together almost every perspective to begin to make schools that really are for humans.
